Doom Wiki:Privacy policy/draft

WMF_open_door.png Introduction
This is the official Privacy Policy of the Doom Wiki at DoomWiki.org, a volunteer-based, community-driven Project. This policy describes how DoomWiki.org collects, uses, and shares information we receive from you through your use of the Project Site. It is essential to understand that, by using the Project Site, you consent to the collection, transfer, processing, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. That means that reading this Policy carefully is important.

Definitions
Because everyone should be able to easily understand how and why their information is collected and used, we use common language instead of more formal terms throughout this Policy. To help ensure your understanding of some particular key terms, here is a table of translations:

Principles
The DoomWiki.org Project places a high priority on in order to maximize constructive contributions. We do not believe that anyone should have to reveal Personal Information as a condition of participation. The Project Staff has designed its operational infrastructure with the hope and intention that, as long as you act in good faith, considerations of privacy should never interfere with your use and enjoyment of the Project Site.

Any and all use and retention of Personal Information by the Project is limited to what is strictly necessary on a technological level to provide the Project's basic service as a publicly accessible. Personal Information is never automatically made public, except in a few cases where you may provide consent to do so (see "Publicly Visible Information" below). Such exceptions are designed to be transparent to you, and in particular to indicate alternate methods not exposing the Personal Information, before you perform the action. Furthermore, in the event of undesired disclosure of information arising from activity within the Project (see "Scope" below), you will always have prompt recourse to the Project Staff for corrective action.

The DoomWiki.org Project is not a business organization, nor do we conduct marketing activities or engage with third parties to conduct marketing activities on our behalf. You are neither required nor incentivized to provide things like your real name, address, or date of birth to sign up for a standard account or contribute content to the Project Site. We do not sell or rent your Personal Information, nor do we give it to others to sell you anything.

We recognize, however, that any system sufficiently open to allow participation by the general public is also to certain kinds of abuse and counterproductive behavior. This policy is one mechanism established to prevent or remedy such disruptions.

Scope
In general, this policy applies to information derived from the browsing and editing of pages, use of APIs, mobile sites and applications, emails, and notifications from us or sent to us from you. The DoomWiki.org Project collects and retains the least amount of personally identifiable information needed to fulfill its operational needs.

This Project can have no influence over the interaction of users outside the DoomWiki.org Project Site, e.g. via email, IRC or other chat, or independent websites (such as doomworld.com). Users should assess the risks involved, and their personal need for privacy, before using these methods of communication.

Some situations that are not covered by this policy include the following:
 * Community members: The DoomWiki.org Project Site is a collaborative effort that is constantly maintained and updated by a global community of volunteers. As a result, some volunteers have access to certain Personal Information, and use of that Personal Information may not be governed by this Privacy Policy. This may include:
 * Other users. We provide several tools that allow users to communicate with each other. The communications may be covered by this Policy while they pass through our systems, but the users who receive these communications, and what they do with the communications once they receive them, are not covered by this Policy.
 * Third parties: This Privacy Policy only covers the way the DoomWiki.org Project collects, uses, and discloses Personal Information and does not address the practices of third parties. For example, this Privacy Policy does not address the practices of:
 * Websites run by other organizations, such as websites linked from the "References" section of an article. These organizations may receive information from you if you visit their websites after using the DoomWiki.org Project Site. They are governed by their own privacy policies.
 * Local configuration of your device: Because of the way Internet connectivity works, your use of the Project Site is assumed to store certain data on your device, such as by the browser application, or automated tracking functionality within the operating system of a mobile device. Except as noted below under "Hidden information", the Project has no access to or control over these transactions, and neither Project Staff nor the DoomWiki.org community can provide general technical support to you. You are responsible for the overall security and configuration of any device you use to access the Project Site.

Publicly Visible Information
Anyone with (and not otherwise restricted from doing so) may edit the publicly editable pages of the Project Site, with or without logging in as a registered user. By doing this, editors create a published document, and a public record of all content added, subtracted, or changed. This is a public act, and an editor is identified publicly as the author of each revision. All contributions made to this Project, and all publicly available information about those contributions, are irrevocably licensed and may be freely copied, quoted, reused, and adapted by third parties with few restrictions.

The DoomWiki.org Project does not require editors to register with an account. The will show when your contribution or deletion was made, as well as your username (if you are signed in) or your IP address (if you are not signed in).

Unless this Policy says otherwise, you should assume that information that you actively contribute to the Project Site, including Personal Information, is publicly visible and can be found by search engines. As with most activity on the Internet, anything you share may be copied and redistributed throughout the Internet by other people. Please do not contribute any information that you are uncomfortable making permanently public, like revealing your real name or location in your contributions.

You should be aware that specific data made public by you can be used by anyone for analysis and to infer further information, such as which country a user is from, political affiliation and gender.

For editors who do not log in, the IP address used is publicly and indefinitely credited as the author of the edit. It may be possible for a third party to identify the author from this IP address in conjunction with other information available. Additionally, an IP address may be shared by multiple users, as at a school or business, or in a large which assigns addresses dynamically. In such cases, the user may become associated with that organization or geographical area due to the activities of the other users. Logging in with a registered account therefore allows for better preservation of privacy.

If you choose to create an account, your username will be publicly visible, so please be careful about using your real name as your username. Your password is only used to verify that the account is yours. Your IP address is also automatically submitted to us, and we record it temporarily in a confidential location to help prevent abuse (see "IP Addresses" below). No other personal information is required: no name, no email address, no date of birth, no credit card information.

Once created, user accounts cannot be removed entirely. This is because your public contributions must remain associated with their author ("you") per the legal requirements of our Creative Commons license. In some circumstances, the DoomWiki.org community can assist users with removing additional information related to their account from the Project. Due to technical limitations of the MediaWiki software, we cannot commit to honoring all requests for changing usernames. Project Staff will however change a username in order to comply with any applicable privacy regulation, or when they otherwise have a reasonable belief that failing to honor the request will result in harm or threat of harm to any person or persons (whether or not such persons have access to that account).

Registered users select a password, which is confidential and used to verify the integrity of their account. Although the Doom Wiki has supported since 2016, it is also recommended that each user choose a password unique to their DoomWiki.org account, and change it regularly.

Edits or other contributions to this project, on articles and non-article pages, are generally retained forever. Erasing text from a page does not permanently delete it. Normally, anyone can look at a previous version of an article and see what was there. Even if an article or an individual contribution is "deleted", a user entrusted with increased access may still see what was removed from public view. Information can be permanently deleted only by the Project Staff. Aside from the rare circumstance when the Project is required to remove editing-history material in response to a or equivalent legal process (including valid requests made under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation), there is no expectation of any permanent deletion occurring.

Data on user contributions, such as the times at which users edited and the number of edits they have made, are publicly available via user contributions lists, and in aggregated forms such as Special:Statistics. It is conceivable that other users may independently collect and aggregate site revisions.

IP Addresses
When a visitor requests or reads a page, no more information is collected than is typically collected by web sites. The DoomWiki.org Project will retain raw of such transactions, including the originating IP address of your computer or proxy server, but these logs will never be published nor used to track legitimate users. Any such logs are retained for the minimum amount of time consistent with maintenance, protection, and necessary operational monitoring of the Project Site, and our obligations under applicable law.

Metadata
We may receive location data from your device. For example, if you upload a photograph, we may receive metadata, such as the place and time you took the photo, automatically from your device. Please be aware that the default setting on your mobile device typically includes the metadata in your photo or video upload to the DoomWiki.org Project Site. If you do not want metadata sent to us and made public at the time of your upload, please change your settings on your device.

Other automatic information
Because of how web browsers work, we receive some information automatically when you visit the Project Site. This information includes:
 * the type of device you are using (possibly including unique device identification numbers),
 * the type and version of your browser,
 * your browser's language preference,
 * the type and version of your device's operating system,
 * in some cases, the name of your Internet Service Provider or mobile carrier,
 * the website that referred you to the Project Site,
 * which pages you request and visit,
 * and the date and time of each request you make to the Project Site.

Information we collect
We actively collect some types of information with a variety of commonly-used technologies. These generally include a variety of "locally stored data" technologies such as cookies and local storage. Depending on which technology we use, locally stored data can be anything from text, pictures, and whole articles to Personal Information (like your IP address) and information about your use of the Project Site (like your username or the time of your visit).

Locally stored data helps us do things such as:
 * Provide you with a customizable experience, such as using cookies to know your language preference, and to remember the user preferences you set so we can provide you with the customized look and feel that you want.
 * Deliver more relevant content to you faster. For example, we use local storage to store your most recently read articles directly on your device, so they can be retrieved quickly.
 * Make the Project Site more convenient to use, such as by using cookies to maintain your session when you log in or to remember your username in the login field.

MediaWiki sets a temporary on a visitor's computer whenever a page is visited. Readers who do not intend to log in or edit may deny this cookie; it will be deleted at the end of the browser session. More cookies may be set upon login, to maintain logged-in status. If one saves a user name or password in one's browser, that information will be saved for up to 30 days, and is re-sent to the server on every visit to the site. Contributors using public computers, who do not wish to show their usernames to future users of the machine, should clear these cookies after use.

Except insofar as it may be required by law, no person should disclose, or knowingly expose, user passwords and/or cookies generated to identify a user.

While the examples above concerning information about you collected through the use of data collection tools are kept confidential in accordance with this Policy, please note that some information about the actions taken by your username is made publicly available through public logs alongside actions taken by other users. For example, a public log may include the date your account was created on the Project Site along with the dates that other accounts were created on the Project Site.

Permitted uses
We use your information for the legitimate purpose of pursuing our mission, including:

Operation of the Project Site, sharing your contributions and administering our services

 * To help you share your knowledge with the world and add new features to our services.
 * To arrange access to your account and provide you with related service.
 * To send administrative information to you, such as changes to our policies.
 * To allow you to send messages to another person if you choose to do so. Direct communications between users (such as messages sent through the "Email this user" feature), to the extent such communications are nonpublic and stored in or transit through DoomWiki.org Project systems, are kept confidential by use, except as provided in this Policy.

Providing customized services

 * To provide to you custom content, notices, and settings and to enhance your experience with the Project Site.

Sending emails

 * Use of the MediaWiki watchlist feature, article talk pages, and user pages may cause our system to automatically send you email messages, to notify you about activities on the Project Site. These email messages are optional and can be disabled through your user preferences. Some of these features are enabled by default. By entering an email address into the DoomWiki.org Project systems, you are consenting to such use until such time as you disable the features manually.

Improving the Project Site and making your user experience safer and better

 * To use your public contributions, either aggregated with the public contributions of others or individually, to create new features or data-related products or to learn more about how the Project Site is used.
 * To fight spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of abuse.

Access to hidden information
The DoomWiki.org Project Site is operated entirely by volunteer contributors. A few dedicated users have been entrusted by the community with enhanced technical tools, in order to carry out necessary maintenance tasks. From time to time, this may allow them access to private user information. Such information is used only for certain specific activities intended to serve the well-being of the project as a whole, namely:


 * Server log data may be examined by the Project Staff in the course of solving technical problems, such as tracking down ill-behaved or s that overtax the site.
 * Large-scale vandalism or spamming may be addressed by range blocking of registered accounts, which requires temporarily associating usernames with IP addresses. This information is not made public, and only the resultant IP range is recorded in the block log.
 * If a technical issue is sufficiently severe as to endanger the existence of the Project, the staff may choose to consult an external vendor. This third party, in the course of their professional activity, would require access to server log data and related information.

It is the policy of the DoomWiki.org Project to avoid distributing any personally identifying information outside this trusted group of users for any reason. Exceptions to this are outlined in the Sharing section below.

With Your Permission
We share your information for a particular purpose, only if you agree.

For Legal Reasons
We will access, use, preserve, and/or disclose your Personal Information if we reasonably believe it necessary to satisfy a valid and legally enforceable warrant, subpoena, court order, law or regulation, or other judicial or administrative order. We are committed to notifying you via email at least ten (10) calendar days, when possible, before we disclose your Personal Information in response to a legal demand. However, we may only provide notice if we are not legally restrained from contacting you, there is no credible threat to life or limb that is created or increased by disclosing the request, and you have provided us with an email address.

Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal objections or defenses you may have to a third party's request (whether it be civil, criminal, or governmental) to disclose your information. We recommend seeking the advice of legal counsel immediately if such a request is made involving you.

To Protect You, Ourselves and Others
DoomWiki.org Project Staff may need to share your Personal Information if it is reasonably believed to be necessary to enforce or investigate potential violations of this Privacy Policy, or other Project policies codifying real-world legal obligations on our part such as the Terms of Use. We may also need to access and share information to investigate and defend ourselves against legal threats or actions.

We hope that this situation never arises, but we may disclose your Personal Information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm or death to one or more specified or unspecified persons. We may also disclose your Personal Information if we reasonably believe it necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise assess and address potential spam, malware, fraud, abuse, unlawful activity, and security or technical concerns.

Third-party Content On-Site
In order to make it possible for this site to operate efficiently and on-budget, and to provide access to external rich media sources, accesses may be made to third-party servers as a result of utilizing the site. Information transmitted to these third-party sites is limited to the minimum possible and is anonymized to the greatest extent possible. Currently the only third-party sites to which information may be transmitted, depending on your configuration, include the following:
 * www.google-analytics.com
 * www.paypalobjects.com (if using the Monaco skin only)
 * www.youtube.com and related domains (when visiting pages with embedded videos only)

Because You Made It Public
Any information you post publicly on the DoomWiki.org Project Site is just that – public. For example, if you put your mailing address on your talk page, that is public, and not protected by this Policy. And if you edit without registering or logging into your account, your IP address will be seen publicly. Please think carefully about your desired level of anonymity before you disclose Personal Information on your user page or elsewhere.

How Do We Protect Your Data?
We strive to protect your information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. We use a variety of physical and technical measures, policies, and procedures (such as access control procedures,, and physical security) designed to protect our systems and your Personal Information. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as completely secure data transmission or storage, so we cannot guarantee that our security will not be breached (by technical measures or through violation of our policies and procedures).

We will never ask for your password by email (but may send you a temporary password via email if you have requested a password reset).

How Long Do We Keep Your Data?
Once we receive Personal Information from you, we keep it for the shortest possible time that is consistent with the maintenance, understanding, and improvement of the Project Site, and our obligations under applicable law. Non-personal information may be retained indefinitely.

Please remember that certain information, such as your IP address (if you edit while not logged in) and any public contributions to the Project Site, is archived and displayed indefinitely by design; the transparency of the project's contribution and revision histories is critical to its efficacy and trustworthiness.

WMF_sign.png Important info
For the protection of the DoomWiki.org Project and other users, if you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, you may not use the DoomWiki.org Project Site.

Where and What is the DoomWiki.org Project?
The DoomWiki.org Project is a volunteer organization based in Chicago, Illinois, and Tecumseh, Oklahoma, with servers and data centers located in the U.S. If you decide to use the Project Site, whether from inside or outside of the U.S., you understand that your Personal Information will be collected, transferred, stored, processed, disclosed and otherwise used in the U.S. as described in this Privacy Policy. You also understand that your information may be transferred by us from the U.S. to other countries, which may have different or less stringent data protection laws than your country, in connection with providing services to you.

Our Response to Do Not Track (DNT) signals
We are strongly committed to not sharing nonpublic information and Personal Information with third parties. In particular, we do not allow tracking by third-party websites you have not visited (including advertising networks and social platforms), nor do we share your Personal Information with any third parties for marketing purposes. Under this Policy, we may share your information only under particular situations, which you can learn more about in the “When May We Share Your Information” and “Third-party Content On-Site” sections of this Privacy Policy.

Because we protect all users in this manner, we do not change our behavior in response to a web browser's "do not track" signal.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
The DoomWiki.org Project Site is not a site aimed at children, the primary topic of its material being a video game which is rated M by the ESRB, and therefore recommended only for people 17 and older. We do not solicit, collect, or store any personally identifiable information from persons under 13 years of age. When Project Staff have actual knowledge of any such information willfully posted by a user, it will be removed.

We additionally can make no warranty or guarantee that the content on the Project Site is appropriate for minors and recommend that parents and guardians utilize the full extent of their judgment before allowing minors access to this site.

Changes to This Privacy Policy
Because circumstances naturally change over time and we want to ensure our Privacy Policy accurately reflects our practices and the law, it may be necessary to modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. We reserve the right to do so in the following manner:


 * In the event of substantial changes, we will provide the proposed changes to our users for an open comment period lasting at least thirty (30) calendar days. Prior to the start of any comment period, we will provide notice of such changes and the opportunity to comment via the Project Site.
 * For minor changes, such as grammatical fixes, administrative or legal changes, or corrections of inaccurate statements, we will post the changes and, when possible, provide at least three (3) calendar days' prior notice via the Project Site.

We ask that you please review the most up-to-date version of our Privacy Policy. Your continued use of the DoomWiki.org Project Site after this Privacy Policy becomes effective constitutes acceptance of this Privacy Policy on your part. Your continued use of the DoomWiki.org Project Site after any subsequent version of this Privacy Policy becomes effective, following notice as outlined above, constitutes acceptance of that version of the Privacy Policy on your part.

Disclaimer
Although the DoomWiki.org Project Staff puts forth a committed effort to safeguard the security of the limited user information collected and retained on its servers, determined third parties may still develop data-mining and other methods to uncover such information and disclose it. For this reason, the DoomWiki.org Project can make no guarantee against unauthorized access to information provided in the course of participating in this project.

This Project does not maintain individual contracts with the third parties to whom personal information may be explicitly transmitted (listed above under "Third-party Content On-Site"). Further, as an all-volunteer organization, we lack the resources to conduct formal legal reviews of policy documents published by said third parties. Therefore, the Project can make no guarantee against unintended harm caused by a third party's policy-compliant uses of the data we share, nor against policy breaches by individuals with access, authorized or unauthorized, to the data held by third parties on our behalf.

Contact Us
If you have questions or suggestions about this Privacy Policy, or the information collected under this Privacy Policy, please email our designated Data Protection Officer at [mailto:haleyjd@hotmail.com haleyjd@hotmail.com]. This is the recommended method for requesting direct intervention by the Project Staff, including but not limited to requests for portable extracts or data erasure under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.

You may alternatively discuss this Policy by editing the page Doom Wiki:Central Processing, where the DoomWiki.org community may be able to answer your question more quickly. Be aware however that this is a public noticeboard; use extreme caution when referring to specific situations where there is a risk of disclosing personal information, or calling further attention to information already disclosed.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you also may have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority competent for your country or region.